Published: July 10, 2010

MANNING, S.C. — On a blisteringly hot afternoon here, Alvin M. Greene talked in a perfunctory way about his improbable candidacy for the United States Senate. But his voice intensified with grievance when the subject turned to his short-circuited career in the Army, from which he was discharged in August involuntarily.

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Travis Dove for The New York Times

A local newspaper took interest.

Mr. Greene said the Army discriminated against him by not promoting him. And yet, he said, it promoted to the rank of major a man who would later be accused of shooting 13 people to death last year at Fort Hood, Tex.

“I didn’t have one promotion in six-and-a-half years of active duty, full time,” Mr. Greene lamented in an interview the other day at his father’s house on the outskirts of this small town in the south-central part of the state.

“I was born and raised right here in South Carolina, and I’m a true American,” he said. “That guy was Middle Eastern and had terrorist ties.”

He was referring to Nidal M. Hasan, whose name he did not use.

Mr. Hasan was born in Virginia to Muslim Palestinian parents and is awaiting trial on 13 counts of premeditated murder; he has not been charged with terrorism.

But in the solitariness of his den, with an overhead fan slicing through dead air, Mr. Greene sees a vast injustice.

“They didn’t pit the world against the terrorist, they pit the world against me,” he said. “The foreign terrorist had it made, and I didn’t.”

In the course of a two-hour interview, Mr. Greene, 32, returned repeatedly to this subject, but he offered no help in deciphering its meaning. He declined to discuss why he might not have been promoted and why he was discharged involuntarily. Military records are private, and Mr. Greene said he would not make his public.

But the interview offered a glimpse into the psyche of an enigmatic man who was catapulted from obscurity onto the national stage a month ago when he won the primary for the Democratic nomination for the Senate. He will face Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican, and Tom Clements of the Green Party in November.

The central mystery of how he captured more than 100,000 votes, or 59 percent, against a candidate who, unlike Mr. Greene, actually campaigned remains unsolved.

Top Democrats say Mr. Greene was put up to the race by mischief-making Republicans; others say he might have won simply because his name appeared first on the ballot. Mr. Greene says he won by “hard work” but cannot name anything he did.

No evidence of fraud has surfaced. And on Friday, the State Law Enforcement Division, which was investigating Mr. Greene’s finances, cleared him of any wrongdoing.

It was trying to square how he could have afforded the $10,440 filing fee in March to get on the June 8 ballot when just a few months earlier he was apparently poor enough to be assigned a public defender to represent him on a felony obscenity charge.

“After a thorough investigation, SLED has concluded that there is no evidence of wrongdoing, criminal intent or deception to the court when Greene applied for a public defender last year,” the agency said. It also determined that he paid for the filing fee with his own savings from the Army, as he has said all along. (The base pay for an E-4 in 2009 with at least six years of service was $2,219 per month.)

He is still due in state court Monday on the obscenity charge, in which a student at the University of South Carolina said he showed her pornography and tried to go to her dorm room with her. Afterward, a relative paid the $500 fee to a bonding company for him to be released on $5,000 bail.

But the dropping of the investigation is now the third hurdle that Mr. Greene has cleared on his way to the November election.

Last month, state Democrats reluctantly rejected a request to throw out the results of the primary. And earlier this month, Linda Ketner, an erstwhile Democratic Congressional candidate, dropped her bid to run for the Senate seat as an independent.

With the new ruling, Democrats are likely to be stuck with Mr. Greene at the top of the ticket, which could undermine their candidates for other offices, from governor on down. On the other hand, it could bolster whatever force was out there for him in the first place and enhance his candidacy, unorthodox though it may be. Polls still show, however, that Mr. DeMint is the heavy favorite, which is why no serious Democrat ran against him in the first place.

In the middle of the swirl, Mr. Greene is proceeding with his campaign and has now scheduled his first speaking event. It is set for July 18 at the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church here in Manning. But mostly, he seems to sit in his den, watch television and answer the phone. He now has a rudimentary Web site, www.alvingreeneforussenator.com, which he did not have during the primary, and says he has a “growing” staff.

But Mr. Greene, who is unemployed and has no computer, would not identify anyone he has hired or say whether he or someone else created the Web site.

The topic that animated him was what he said was unfair treatment against him in the Army, where he was a supplies specialist. Earlier, he had served in the Air Force and had security clearance to work in intelligence, but he said the Air Force also discharged him involuntarily.